Posts tagged as:

New York Times

What Do Newsday’s 35 Subscribers Say About Paid Content?

by Daria Steigman on February 2, 2010

If Newsday is the benchmark, The New York Times is in trouble.

I’m used to filing away random stats while listening to sports radio, but I didn’t expect then to involve newspaper readers. But then I learned that Newsday has accumulated 35 subscribers since James Dolan (who also owns Madison Square Garden and the hapless Knicks) bought the publication and decided to put all the paper’s online content behind a paid firewall. That’s right: 35 people in three months.

Let’s state the obvious up front: Dolan is a terrible businessman. He’s the same guy who refused to fire Knicks coach Isaah Thomas even after he was found by a court to have sexually harassed one of his employees. So it’s not really a surprise that he’s driving another business into oblivion.

I think the Newsday story is relevant to the broader question of whether people are willing to pay for content. And my guess is yes–if it’s good content. The Freemium model isn’t about free; it’s about moving people from free services to premium (paid) ones. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Business Journals, and a few other select newspapers are likely to survive as online publications because they’ll figure out price points and revenue streams. And because, unlike Newsday, they have something we want to read.

Photo by wili_hybrid (Flickr).

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Second Look: Perfect Pushups, Women’s Rights, and More

by Daria Steigman on August 26, 2009

Each week I’m highlighting 3 or 4 posts, surveys, and other news that I have read and/or tweeted about that you may not have seen. As the name implies, I think they deserve a second look.

Here’s your second look for this week:

  • Ask Why, Not What. Strategy rules. Mitch Joel, author of the upcoming Six Pixels of Separation, points out that too many people ask “what are we doing…?” (a tactical question) when they should be asking “why are we doing…?”
  • Blogging Drives Business. Hubspot looked at small businesses with and without blogs. Those with blogs had 55 percent more visitors. Some good food for thought here.
  • Perfect Pushup. A profile of Alden Mills, who talks about how being a Navy SEAL prepared him for business and entrepreneurship.
  • Empowering Women to End Poverty. This New York Times Magazine piece on the linkages between women’s rights, empowerment, and fighting poverty offers a look at what’s possible and how much is left to do. One big question I’d ask the authors: Why is microfinance so much more successful in Asia than in Africa?

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Wal-Mart Vice-Chair on the Crux of Leadership

by Daria Steigman on May 26, 2009

Great interview with Wal-Mart Vice Chair Eduardo Castro-Wright about leadership and what they don’t teach you in business school. The crux of leadership: trust. Leadership is “about being able to get people to go to places they never thought they could go,” he said in an interview with the New York Times.

Other highlights:

  • “You can accomplish almost anything in life if you do not care who takes credit for it. So I’ve tried to do more of that. And I’ve tried to do less of the things that make business more complex. I really like simplicity.”
  • “I think that business schools could do more to prepare kids to deal with the often more difficult side of business management and leadership. The balance of courses is probably weighted to the numeric side of business as opposed to the people side of business.”
  • “I honestly believe … that cultural differences, which are so often touted as the rationale for making decisions in business, are grossly overrated, and that human behavior really doesn’t have a language. It’s pretty much the same everywhere.”

And my personal favorite, in response to how people make business more complicated than it is: “I think that all of us read far too many business books…We have a very clear view of what we do for consumers around the world. And we can describe our complete strategy in 10 words.”

Read the entire interview here.

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